The Survivors of Lemuria

Real Date 4/19/2014

20

APR/14

Due to the holiday weekend the turnout today was on the low side — only Dallas showed up. Fortunately, that gave us two characters to work with: Nallia the elf cleric/ranger and Barlyn the dwarf cleric.

We took a return to Kajalla for the rest of the group as a given, and Barlyn proceeded to complete training as a fifth-level priest of Pyrros. While meditating as a part of the training he had a brief vision of dwarfs killing other dwarfs to the south, with the sound of running water in the background.

Hoping to be in time to stop fratricidal conflict, Barlyn gathered Nallia and began heading south. While there is a river that runs through the length of Kajalla, the river itself consists of two separate rivers which only join together within the city’s walls (where they later divide again into two main courses.) One branch goes to the southeast, the other to the southwest. Hoping to avoid taking the wrong path, Nallia and Barlyn chose to split the difference, as long as they could remain within earshot of the rivers.

Their trip to the south was punctuated by a number of encounters with animals: a herd of buffalo, a herd of elephants, a leopard, and a tiger were all avoided either by the use of the Speak with Animals spell or, in the case of the snoring leopard, by simple stealth.

However, a mighty rhinoceros did not want to talk, and was slain with dispatch. Shortly thereafter (and after carving off a supply of rhinoceros meat) the intrepid pair arrived at the dwarf village of Dhavadhi, where a local woodcutter explained that a feud was brewing between the premier family of that village and a poor family of a nearby village called Khotivak. It seemed that a young dwarf from Khotivak had spent years of work saving up the standard bride-price to pay the family of his beloved (this being a standard dwarf custom) whereupon the bride-to-be’s father had only asked for a pittance amounting to 1% of the normal amount. The groom-to-be’s father had taken that as an insult, and stormed back to Khotivak to begin sharpening weapons.

Barlyn spoke with both the young lady dwarf in question and her father, and offered to act as a go-between. Traveling for four days from Dhavadhi to Khotivak, he and Nallia negotiated their way past a large pack of deadly Komodo lizards by using the rhinoceros meat as an appropriate bribe. Arriving in Khotivak, Barlyn managed to secure an interview with the aggrieved father, and convinced him to travel, with the young swain, back to Dhavadhi to negotiate a settlement before matters came to violence. They arrived safely, having slain an attacking group of carnivorous apes on the way, at which point Barlyn cleverly spent a good deal of his own money obtaining sufficient drinkables for the two patriarchs, each of whom agreed to drink with Barlyn, but not with his rival. Barlyn offered to pay the normal bride-price himself, but a compromise was eventually struck whereby the poor young dwarf would pay half the normal bride-price, and honor was satisfied for all parties. After this point Barlyn spent some more money throwing a party for both villages, and performed the wedding himself — is is a priest after all!